Local RPS talent prevailed when Monica Martinez, a jewelry store owner from Toronto who entered for fun, with no intention of winning, won match after match to eventually seize the title and the $10,000 grand prize.

On Saturday night, Monica battled for more than five hours with spirited “walk-ons,” seasoned RPS veterans spanning all parts of Canada and the US, and country champs and competitors from as far away as Australia, New Zealand, Norway, and Argentina.

This year, more than 700 players and spectators descended on Toronto’s Steam Whistle brewery on Saturday night for the world’s premier RPS event. It was a spirited night of sporting subculture competition featuring outrageous costumes, team jerseys, face paint, and a Street RPS competition (separate from the sanctioned main event).

“We applaud the enthusiasm and sportsmanship showed by all the competitors,” says Dave Soyka, Marketing Manager at Yahoo! Canada. “Now it’s Monica’s time to shine as the new reigning Yahoo! RPS World Champion.”

Just days after the T-Mobile G1 smartphone went on the market, a group of security researchers have found what they call a serious flaw in the Android software from Google that runs it.

One of the researchers, Charles A. Miller, notified Google of the flaw this week and said he was publicizing it now because he believed that cellphone users were not generally aware that increasingly sophisticated smartphones faced the same threats that plague Internet-connected personal computers.

Mr. Miller, a former National Security Agency computer security specialist, said the flaw could be exploited by an attacker who might trick a G1 user into visiting a booby-trapped Web site.

Sun Microsystems releases Java Standard Edition 6 Update 10, known as Java SE 6u10. The update improves the usability and performance of Sun’s Java Platform on desktop computers. Java SE 6u10 offers new features, including improved startup time for Java applications and applets.

The next update to Windows Vista will enter beta testing next week, bringing with it support for Blu-ray drives, among other enhancements.

In a blog posting on Friday, Microsoft confirmed that a beta version of Windows Vista Service Pack 2 will be released next week.

“Because we’ve adopted a single serviceability model, these improvements are integrated into a single service pack covering both Windows Vista (client) and Windows Server 2008 (server) versions,” Windows executive Mike Nash said in a blog. “This should also minimize deployment and testing complexity for our customers.”

The software maker said earlier this week that it was working on Vista SP2, but wouldn’t go into detail. A support document posted this month, however, suggested a beta version was in the offing.

In addition to Blu-ray, Vista SP2 will add support for Bluetooth 2.1 as well as include Windows Search 4.0, the latest version of Microsoft’s desktop search technology.